Tech firm Atos has a plan to ban all internal email. Says most messages are useless and/or spam and that they are akin to "smog" out in the real world. The firm will try to emphasize more use of technologies like chat, video conferencing, and collaborative technologies like wiki's.

I think it's a bold step. How many times have I lamented how much time I seem to devote to just dealing with email (and I don't even get that much). Some tasks are best suited for email, but I'm really curious how this experiment turns out.

Actually, I'm curious about the unintended consequences of this policy. Maybe more staffers will turn to private email accounts or SMS or maybe even social networks, totally bypassing corporate security and privacy measures and potentially opening them up to huge liability. We shall see how this unfolds. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if they try this plan for a while then totally scrap the idea and go back to the way things were before it has really had a chance.

The article is here.

I work for a tech firm. We would come screeching to a halt without email. Maybe this company is different, but this would definitely be the wrong move for us.

We (defense contractor) tried "No Email Friday" once. And I mean - one single time.

Haven't heard of it since then.

Yuck. The facebook style online folders are the equivalent of hitting "reply all" on every single email. You have to wade through everybody else’s whatnot trying to figure out which ones are pertinent to you.

My company tried to do a quasi-social media thing for collaberation. Yeah, even the people who thought it was a good idea stopped using it after a week. My boss had to order me to set up my profile

Good luck with that idea. Arney is exactly right. People at companies that don't have corporate email rely on personal email accounts to function. I see it every day in small businesses.

I almost had my dog trained not to eat. Then it died on me.

I don't see this experiment ending well.

Just from an IT support issue this is a nightmare; when the hotmail and yahoo accounts take over the users would still expect corporate support staff to handle any problems, but they'd no longer have the access to do it.

I suspect someone has a product they are trying to promote. I cannot imagine this making any sense at all.

Spam is not as big a problem these days. We have learned to filter it out in both technical and non-technical ways.

The worse problem is people who CC all kinds of people wih emails that are only vaguely related to that person's job, and 6 months later managers expect everyone who got copied to remember every line written in the thing. It is worse than the mass distribution of memos because it is so easy to do.

I also rarely get any spam messages anymore on my work email. But there are certainly many companies or departments within companies that have a culture of cc'ing anyone remotely connected to you. It's almost like a competitive sport--the more names on the cc line, the more important you must be!

But you're right, ILBob, the ease of sending email to multiple people encourages this phenomenon. Perhaps forcing people to communicate via, say, chat will enforce a new kind of discipline. Fewer messages to bother unrelated people, more brevity, and people forced to jot down only the most important info in a notebook (I already do this with emails).

I've been in IT for 25 years and I think email is a very disruptive technology but at the same time it saves most workers from having to have a secretary and it does provide a nice historical reference for referring back to later on for information.

The problem with email is that it tends to push people to stay glued to their inbox and feel compelled to stop their current train of thought and concentration and deal with the email message. That is very disruptive to productivity in most (but not all) companies. It's not a big problem at most firms but some firms have real problems dealing with it and some don't even realize it's a problem.

I've worked with a lot of companies that do recognize it's a problem and there are several solutions that can be implemented in stages to break the hold that email has. First, you can force a policy down to all desktops and phones that turns off any sound or popup notification of an incoming email. This is the first step in breaking the lure for employees to drop everything and look at their inbox all day long. Beyond that, you can train your staff to set aside a set time to answer emails - for instance every day at 4pm - or maybe twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. This forces urgent matters to be elevated to phone calls or video conferencing and employees can leave their email client closed throughout the day and focus their attention on their work.

Another plan I've helped design and put in place at some companies brings back the role of a group secretary. A secretary serving a group of anywhere from 5 to 10 employees seems to be the ideal size and if implemented the right way, you can make that workgroup more productive and more profitable and they will all use much less email. But they still use email, you just break the slavery aspects of it and the secretary streamlines the communications.

Email started out as a way to supplement and speed up the typing and sending of letters sent through the postal system. In the days of letter writing, people took time to carefully choose their words and think through what they were writing. Once you get a corporate culture where email is a rapid fire short message system, the "well thought out" part of messaging goes out the window. Ideally a company will put in place training and procedures that returns some sanity to corporate communications and that usually involves using much less email but not a complete rejection of it.

That's sounds like a good idea to me. Heck, businesses ran just fine before there was this new age thing called email. What's wrong with interoffice mail like in the good old days? I swear the current generation couldn't even tell the time if there wasn't an app for that.












j/k

Thoughtful response, NuggetHoarder.

Funny that "rapid fire" email seemed too slow when instant messaging became popular, then SMS on our mobile phones broke our tether to the computer. And then a further generation does most of its text communications through social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) The technology is giving us new options at lightning speed, but social behavior hasn't really been able to keep up with it--at least in developing conventions beyond the merely casual level.

I agree that training would help with whatever communications methods a company decides to use, but how many companies train anyone anymore? Nowadays, employers seem to expect new hires to either already have all the skills they need or it's all on-the-job "training". And forget about ongoing training for existing employees.

I actually prefer email to IM's because they allow me to compose a response with a little thought. Responses do not need to be instantaneous with no thought.

I'm not a fan of twitter and I do not text from my phone.

Just to address this one small portion of the discussion, I just hired someone and I have a training plan in place. The plan includes self-study, formal technical training and shadowing (where the new hire is teamed up with an existing employee and sent out to work with a customer). I received rather less training at this company but I came on board with over a decade of experience.

Companies that want new hires to succeed either need to have a plan in place to train them or need to be hiring people who already know the job.

It's like anything; ideally you'd use the right tool for the job.

IM, telephone and video conferencing are good tools for talking things through and getting quick answers.

One drawback with IM et al. is that it requires your immediate attention; it doesn't allow you to manage how and when you communicate as easily as email does. It also makes for a much more difficult audit trail; when miscommunication happens it can be much more difficult to figure out how things went wrong or what decisions were actually made and approved (an important thing for a consultant!) .

Email is better at communicating complex ideas and those things that require planning, thought and research.

Email also allows for a much more asynchronous form of communication, if you are busy you can simply look at your messages later. Along with this, it is a less demanding form of communication; if I IM, phone, or just show up at your desk I am coming to you with the expectation that you will stop what you are doing and give me your attention now, if I email you I allow the communication to happen on your terms.

Different jobs will have different demands so the appropriate toolbox of technologies will differ from job to job.

Note that Atos continues to use email for outward (ex. customer-facing) business. Its just internal to Atos that they're opting out of email as a communication tool. I can buy that, it may be worth a try there. They are essentially a European company, so they can IM and communicate with co-workers in nearly the same time zones without alot of cost from removing the email tool. And I have to believe that for asynchronous situations (ex. 5 week European vacation schedules) there could still be some emails in the cards for Atos workers. But in alot of cases, you have other options - wikis or sharepoints for example. Also, sometimes you want data retention, and sometimes you don't. I work in a heavily litigious environment, I can't even remember the last time my work email wasn't on indefinite data retention for a regulatory and/or IPR reasons. If EU regulators ever approached Atos execs for their retained communications, it may be better to not have email in the first place; because they can't suddenly require that you use email if they want to put you on data retention (or at least I don't think they can force it on you, even in the EU).

Time has a way of removing technology tools all the time. We could approach a period when fewer and fewer folks are accessible via email addresses, but can be reached by near instant IM, Skype or Lync type messaging platforms that track our location and status more directly than traditional email. I already get alot of phone calls first thing in the AM when I log onto my email and my Lync shows me as Available, co-workers in different time zones will use that as a sign I can be contacted, and either call me on my laptop (which receives my work phone calls automatically) or IM me. They don't know I'm sitting in my underwear just sipping my first cup of coffee...

I remember the days before email, and I look forward to the days without it again someday. And hopefully I'll be able to log off of all the instantaneous communications 'options' as well, and just be blessedly offline.

I am old enough to remember those days. We used to have these things called "routing slips". They were just a list of names, usually of everyone in your department. You'd staple them to a memo. When it showed up in your mailbox (not email box, but "regular box") you would read it and cross your name off and go put it in the next uncrossed off name's mail box.

Our boss routed EVERYTHING. I think he invented spam. Because these routing slips were anonymous about who started the memo on it's route, we started picking up all kinds of garbage from our trash cans - orange peels, used Kleenix, etc. - and sticking routing slips on them and sending them on their way.

Believe it or not, the boss finally got the hint!

I've heard of such too - but this was more based on the idea the Millenium Generation prefers things like IMs, twittering, etc. so email might be a dying technology. Me, I think that's kaphooey. As a baby boomer, I can't get a handle on how very short messages can carry any real information at all. Other than "meet me at 10:00 am in Conference rm 2". I rarely text, I don't IM, and I have some condescending feelings about "twits" er rather twitters and their channels.

I mean what would be the point of having Bulletin Boards and Forums or even blogs then?

However there are evils associated with emails too. They can take over your day and propagate without warning. My personal pet peeve is my supervisor who inisists on Reply ALL with attachements thus killing everybodies email boxes!

It will be interesting to see how this works out.

I don't think it will work well. There just are too many things that email excell at. Email is good for targeting specific people with a well thought out and formulated question - and answering those questions.

But it would do good to weed out the things that email don't handle very well. There are also things that email DO well but still should be handled through other means. "Memo"-like messages from the boss is much better presented through internal web pages, blogs and the like.

There are also a whole ecosystem of different systems that gives you the functionality of twitter, facebook, newsgroups, blogging and anything in between - but exclusive to your corporate network. I'd love to try something like those in a work environment. "tweeting" or blogging about some dilemmas or problems might be infinetly more fun and productive than bogging people with emails ...

The best way to improve email productivity is to get rid of the idea that email is something you "read". Going through correspondence is an active task, not passive reading, so you "do" or "process" email. Schedule time for it (such as twice a day), and don't touch your email client at other times.

The email is processed according to the 4 D's: DO - Delete - Defer - Delegate. If you can't answer immediately (or if it takes more than 2 minutes to answer), move it to another folder and schedule a time to answer it later. Have a folder system so you know where to archive the stuff you want to keep. Delegate whatever someone else should take care of and delete the rest. Your inbox should be empty when you're done.

Like any other tools, instant messaging have their place and function. What I don't like is the idea that I can be interupted whenever, wherever. But I guess if we used IM more internally at work I would have to learn how to fine tune the "available" settings...